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On a New Album, Not Merely Acting Like a Singer

M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel performing as She & Him at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco last month, supporting their new album.Credit
Ryan Muir

On screen the actress Zooey Deschanel is often cast as the quirky naïf or the ironic wit, the kind of character too flustered or too eye-rollingly impatient to multitask. But in real life Ms. Deschanel is a natural hyphenate, an actress-musician-crafty girl.

Now she is showcasing her harmony-loving side in a new band, She & Him, with the singer-songwriter-guitarist M. Ward. Their debut album, “Volume One,” is a collection of vintage-sounding country-tinged songs written mostly by Ms. Deschanel and produced by Mr. Ward. Released last month on the indie label Merge Records, it has received surprised acclaim from magazines and blogs alike. (The duo begin a brief tour with sold-out shows at Hiro Ballroom in New York next Monday and Tuesday.)

And unlike the work of other actors-cum-musicians — Russell Crowe’s various pub-rock acts for example — the album doesn’t come across as a vanity project; in person Ms. Deschanel is exactly as indie darling as her fans would hope.

Though she was raised and lives amid celebrity in Los Angeles and has appeared in both hugely popular films (“Elf,” in which she briefly sang) and critical and cult favorites (“Almost Famous,” “All the Real Girls”), it’s easy to imagine her puttering around a cozily decorated Williamsburg loft. She takes home doggie bags, prefers tights to spray-tans and uses David Bowie’s “Changes” as her ring tone. She knits and crochets and makes brownies and gingerbread because, she said, “I like the way people react when you bake, which is, like, just pure childlike joy.”

She has some of that too — an almost hand-clapping glee — when she talks about She & Him. The music has drawn comparisons to 1970s AM radio staples like Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt. It is unironically, unapologetically pleasant; feel-good nostalgia in the best sense. “It sort of defied some of the preconceptions and prejudices I would’ve had about an actor rock album,” said Amrit Singh, the executive editor of the music blog stereogum.com. He compared it favorably to another buzzy actress-and-indie collaboration, Scarlett Johansson’s forthcoming album of Tom Waits covers, produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. Mr. Ward and Ms. Deschanel “seemed like a good stylistic fit,” he said.

She & Him’s album has sold about 26,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen SoundScan, outpacing the debut of the duo’s labelmate Arcade Fire, said Mac McCaughan, a founder of Merge and the singer for the band Superchunk.

Of course, Ms. Deschanel and Mr. Ward, a musician based in Portland, Ore., whose quiet troubadourism sells out midsize clubs, are not unknown. They met for a few hours in 2006 to do a cover of Linda and Richard Thompson’s “When I Get to the Border” for the soundtrack of a little-seen movie, “The Go-Getter,” and immediately found themselves mutually charmed.

“There was a lot of playfulness and spontaneity,” Ms. Deschanel said in an interview in a Manhattan cafe. “I just knew that his attitude was exactly the attitude of somebody I should work with.”

For his part Mr. Ward liked that her voice already had the old-fashioned sound he aimed for in the studio. “There was an immediate trust that’s hard to explain,” he added in a phone interview from Portland, where he is known as Matt.

That their record collections overlapped somewhere between the Carpenters, the Ronettes and Tammy Wynette helped too. When Mr. Ward learned that Ms. Deschanel had a stack of demos at home, he asked for a sample; she nervously agreed to share. Songwriting, she said, was a “very important part of myself, and I wanted to bring it out so I could do more, but I didn’t know how.”

The music — lovely, bittersweet melodies about hook-ups and break-ups — “knocked my socks off,” Mr. Ward, 34, said. “It’s surprising enough to hear it from a songwriter. It’s even more surprising to hear it coming from someone who doesn’t write songs for a living.”

But Ms. Deschanel, 28, was a devoted hobbyist, begging her parents, the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and the actress Mary Jo Deschanel, for piano lessons as a child — she started at the age of 8 — and writing harmony-rich songs by 20. Her piano was perpetually covered in Post-it notes scribbled with ideas, and for a while she had an Andrews Sisters-style cabaret act around Los Angeles with the actress Samantha Shelton. (Following Ms. Deschanel’s lead Mr. Ward began listening to midcentury vocalists like Wanda Jackson and Darlene Love.)

Still, as a professional actress-turned-musician, Ms. Deschanel cannot escape the mantle of, well, actress-turned-musician. “Just because it doesn’t have Zooey’s name on it,” Mr. Singh wrote by e-mail, “doesn’t spare it that scrutiny. Just ask Dogstar. (Keanu Reeves’s horrible, horrible project.)”

Though she initially began recording with Mr. Ward as a lark — “I was like, this is just a present to myself,” she said — when they decided to release a record they were thoughtful about how to promote it. “I wanted a name that was very humble, modest and anonymous,” Ms. Deschanel said. (She was inspired by the Band.)

But they were also aware that the curiosity effect might help them. “There’s going to be a lot of people approaching this record from very different back stories,” Mr. Ward said. “As long as people are listening to the songs first and not getting too caught up with who is making the songs, I’m happy.”

While they were recording, Ms. Deschanel made some guest appearances at Mr. Ward’s shows, but they had their first few performances as She & Him at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Tex., last month. They are still getting their onstage dynamic right: during one show, Ms. Deschanel, dressed in the same flowy gray skirt she later wore to the interview (double-dipping outfits: very indie darling), appeared nervous, barely smiling until nearly the end of the set. At another, Mr. Ward forgot his slide; he improvised with a beer bottle.

Those are the kind of snags this D.I.Y.ish duo thrives on; they’re already planning a Volume Two. Mr. Ward, who has never before produced an entire album for another performer, found he enjoyed having only to play guitar, not sing. Ms. Deschanel relished having more personal control than she does as an actress.

“Sometimes I like the movies I’m in, sometimes I don’t,” she said. “Whereas this, I could say: This is me. I like it. I stand by it.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: On a New Album, Not Merely Acting Like a Singer. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe